The sculptor Nicolaas Billiau viewed the world with a benign smile. This is the reason why his sculptures are sometimes referred to as therapy balancing the everyday stress of contemporary life. His sculptures display unambiguousness and clarity, avoiding dramatic coded messages. They are characteristic of two phenomena: bizarre playful form and bright radiating colour. The bizarreness is reflected in the emotional treatment of proportions and arrangement of forms in composition. Satisfied with inspiration drawn from the surrounding animal kingdom, his rendering does not seek surprising non-existing fantastical monsters. His work displays various anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figures and figurines reminiscent of the fairytale world of animated film with the exception of their spatial composition. In his explorations of form he probably drew on Pop art objects with reminiscences of Surrealism. The enlarged parts of his largely figurative objects and their composition in illogical compact shapes are the principal method of his work. Bubble-like inflated shapes are rendered in paint ed polyester. Billio explores a number of themes, giving preference to faces and masks. His sculpture Smiling Faces is composed on the Janus principle of two-facedness. The use of transformation, substitution, ironic play and baroque exuberance is reminiscent of commedia dell’arte, whose essence has remained unchanged.
